The Best Laid Plans

In my head, I’m one blog post ahead of the reality. How exactly this has happened I’ve no idea, but there’s no way my plans to try and get back to blogging regularly are going to work if I’ve started to imagine posts 😳

I’d love to be able to say it’s because I’ve been so busy crafting, that I haven’t had any time to write, but the truth is far less fun. I’ve been busy doing accounts – YUCK! Worse still I managed to lose 8 months worth of work and then wasted even more time trying to recover it. One of the problems with using an online software package when you have incredibly slow broadband methinks. I’m over it now (well almost) and have begun the process of reentering everything again, this time I’m sticking to a good old fashioned Spreadsheet – just in case.

There has been a little making since my last post, not as much as I’d like, but? I did manage to get a little hat and mitten set knitted up for baby Arthur whilst I was in the UK visiting my daughter for a few days at the beginning of the month.

Both are a mish-mash of different patterns and my ideas. The hat is my standard baby hat knit. I’ve sized it to be somewhere around newborn size because so many of the hats I’ve knitted over the years are just too big, to begin with. They’re so quick to work up, it’s no trouble to knit a few (although I really should make another few).

The mittens, well there’s nothing to them really, but for the life of me I can’t work out why most of the patterns I found had standard length cuffs. There’s absolutely no way they’d stay on Arthur’s hands, so I decided to knit an extra long rib. This means there’s the option to fold them over if it’s easier.

Note to self – When photographing black knitwear, pay special attention and check for fibres and hairs.

The rest of my making time has been taken up with trying to finish a few ongoing projects. Working with my word of the year in mind and accepting that ‘finishing’ is all part of the PROCESS.

The pin weaving I started at the September Meeting of the Handweavers Guild of Cork, is almost complete. I can’t actually decide if I like it at the moment though. Probably as a result of looking at it too much. One of my weaving friends worked on it a little for me whilst we were at a craft fair promoting the HGC before Christmas. She had started to create a fabulous boat, complete with sails, but try as hard as I did, I just couldn’t make it work. So, in the end, I pulled a little of her work back and expanded on the abstract seascape look.

I’m hoping to find the time over the weekend to complete the piece and turn it into something else – perhaps a notebook cover?

Sticking with the idea of completing projects, I’ve also been working on completing my Knitted Diary of 2018. With everything that I had on at the end of December, I had managed to fall behind on my project. In the main, I still found the time to draw the colour of the day and make a note of it in the calendar, but the knitting was put to one side.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks completing the daily squares, which means there’s rather a lot of seaming to be done now. Before I get to that, there’s still the matter of adding a small border to the January panel and two weeks of February. I made a start on that today whilst I was waiting in the car and will get back to it after I’ve finished writing this.

Once knitted, I think it will be ok to cast on something new right?

I mean the seam sewing can only be done in the day because the old eyesight is suffering a bit at the moment. New glasses are on my list of things to buy, but they’ll have to wait a little longer.

I was going to cast on a basic top-down cardi for the little man, but then I saw that Laura Spargo Anderson had released her Bitty Cache design at the reduced price of $1 for the month of February. It’s a lovely little short sleeve jumper that will work up in next to no time in the suggested worsted weight yarn. I’m actually thinking of using two strands of 4ply held together because there are some rather lovely skeins of sock yarn languishing in my yarn museum.

Before I go, I wanted to give a little shout out to a fantastic new space that’s opening up in Ardrahan, Co. Galway – Irish Fibre Crafters. I’ve been watching all the news on Instagram and am hoping to make my way up to Galway tomorrow to show some support and find out more. This week saw the release of dates for lots of different workshops in a diverse range of fibre crafts and there are some tempting goodies of the woolly kind available to purchase.

If you’re in the area, why not head over and if you’re not able to visit, I’ll report back and let you know all about it.